SAN FRANCISCO — A California judge has thrown out a proposed ballot initiative that advocated killing anyone who engages in gay sex, calling the measure “patently unconstitutional.”

Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Raymond Cadei relieved California’s attorney general late Monday of the duty to clear the so-called Sodomite Suppression Act for signature-gathering. Cadei said it would be “inappropriate, waste public resources, generate unnecessary divisions among the public, and tend to mislead the electorate” for Attorney General Kamala Harris to process the proposal.

Harris had asked for a judge’s permission in March to reject the initiative through a legal complaint against its sponsor, Orange County lawyer Matthew McLaughlin.

After McLaughlin did not attempt to defend the measure in court, the attorney general last week sought a default ruling in her favor, a request Cadei granted.

“This proposed act is the product of bigotry, seeks to promote violence, is patently unconstitutional and has no place in a civil society. I applaud the court’s decision to block its title and summary,” Harris said in a statement Tuesday.

McLaughlin did not immediately reply to a telephone call seeking comment on Tuesday. He has not commented publicly on his motivations for pursuing the initiative since he paid $200 to submit it for processing.

The initiative sought to amend the California Penal Code to make sex with a person of the same gender an offense punishable by “bullets to the head or by any other convenient method.”

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